Power Women

Stories of Motherhood, Faith, and the Academy

Nancy Wang Yuen, Deshonna Collier-Goubil, Nancy Wang Yuen, Deshonna Collier-Goubil

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780830853069
• eBook ISBN: 9780830853342
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

IVP Readers' Choice Award

"The dominant narrative we hear as professor mothers is that motherhood and academia are incompatible."

Two challenging vocations, each filled with complexities and daily ups and downs. Yet more and more women are answering the call to both the academy and motherhood. A growing body of literature addresses parent-professors, but what about the particular needs of Christian women seeking to navigate both callings while living out their faith?

With Power Women, Nancy Wang Yuen and Deshonna Collier-Goubil have curated a unique resource by and for Christian academic mothers. This collection of essays includes the voices of women of different backgrounds, academic disciplines, institutions, and stages of parenting and career. Together contributors provide wisdom, encouragement, and solidarity for women who share a similar vocational journey. Combining research with personal stories, they address topics such as these:

• how parenting and teaching can be mutually enriching
• managing ambition, identity, and time
• addressing misconceptions about motherhood in the academy, church, and society
• navigating gender roles in marriage
• taking maternity leave
• flourishing as an adjunct professor
• mentoring professor moms
• resisting imposter syndrome by finding rest in God

There is no magic formula, but there are many paths to thriving in the call to motherhood and the academy. Christian academic moms will find in this book honest yet uplifting reminders that they are not alone. In addition, administrators, family members, and friends will grow in understanding and appreciation of the power women in their lives.

NAVIGATING
ACADEMIA

DIVVYING UP LOVE

Scholarly Ambition and Motherhood as Spiritual Formation

MARIA SU WANG, PHD

It’s almost three o’clock on a Monday afternoon. I’m trying to finish up a bit of writing—frantically skimming and taking notes on a new source that I picked up yesterday—while constantly keeping an eye on the time displayed at the top right-hand corner of my computer screen. Three o’ clock, right when my son’s school day ends, is when the internal negotiations begin: Should I keep him at after-school care until four or five, so I can finish taking these notes? Will he be upset that I didn’t get him earlier? But I’m in a good writing groove right now, I don’t want to lose the momentum. Tomorrow is a long teaching day, so I won’t be able to spend as much time with him. Maybe I will just get him sooner and finish up this work later tonight, after he goes to bed.

This last line of thought, premised on the lure of the academic mother’s time flexibility, usually wins out. And just as frequently, at nighttime I don’t return to the scholarly work I was doing earlier.

This scenario plays out innumerable times every week. My conflict—choosing between time spent on my scholarship and time spent with my children—resonates with a recent article in The Atlantic, where journalist Erika Hayasaki questions the notion, generally assumed in our culture today, that motherhood and the creative life (or fulfilling career/intellectual life) are incompatible. In addition to interviewing several working mothers who shared similar concerns, Hayasaki reveals her own anxieties when she found out she was pregnant with twins:

How would I manage three kids, even with an all-in partner, while also keeping up my journalistic life? I only had so much energy. I would have to divide it. What portion would each family member receive? What portion would that leave for my work? It was not just about energy. It was about divvying up love.1

Hayashi’s confession speaks to the heart of the perceived conflict between being a writer and a mother—a conflict of time, attention, and energy between two fiercely important values: the desire to maintain her creative output and the equally strong desire to be an engaged parent. Moreover, her image of “divvying up love” exemplifies a dominant cultural trope that prevails in our current discourse surrounding the difficulties of managing both motherhood and working life—as one of tension, conflict, and self-division.

This essay explores and interrogates the Christian academic mother’s attempt to “divvy up love”: that is, being keenly aware of the potential for more (as a scholar, teacher, and leader) and yet also painfully conscious of one’s limited capacity because of this season of life. I probe and reflect on what it means to live in the space of constantly partitioning oneself among many loves, especially as it relates to the yearning to maintain an active scholarly life while remaining an actively involved parent. At the same time, I want to be reflective about the language of “divvying up love” and what it connotes and signifies. The other project of this essay is to interrogate the kind of language we use to describe being torn between many loves and how that language can shape how we think and feel about what we do. My hope is that by being conscious of the terms we use, we can imagine other ways of embodying motherhood and scholarly ambition. I begin by reviewing several recent think pieces written on motherhood and professional life from the past decade, probing their ideas, themes, and language. The second half of the essay will explore how the Bible discusses ambition, identity, and time—using scriptural passages to ponder the weaving of motherhood and scholarly ambition. I will think through how the experience of both motherhood and the research process can be vehicles for sanctification. I conclude with some personal reflection and questions for new academic mothers who desire to continue with an active scholarly life. More than anything, the goal of this essay is to make visible and articulate the experience of Christian academic mothers who yearn to be productive in scholarship and feel the pull and responsibility of motherhood. I hope that by simply acknowledging the ambivalence, frustration, and complexity that can accompany the striving for both to coexist, we might actually move forward toward making this coexistence seem less elusive.

WORKING MOTHERHOOD OBSERVED

In the past decade, there have been numerous essays on motherhood and work from academics, journalists, and artists alike.2 We live in a cultural moment in which women (and some men) are questioning, more intensely than ever, whether being successful in one’s career and being an active parent are truly possible. One recurring lament that shows up in many of these essays is the fundamental conflict in time and energy between being devoted to our careers and to our children. Time, according to these authors, is a zero-sum game: there is a finite amount, and time spent on one pursuit (writing, work) is time taken from another (family, children). In these essays, work and motherhood are essentially competitive. So how have women managed the conflict of time and energy between work and family life? What have these essays advised about how to resolve the two?

Number of children and my experience. One option toward mitigating the conflict of time and energy is to have only one child. In her essay in The Atlantic, Lauren Sandler quotes Alice Walker’s famous declaration that women “should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one,” since “with one you can move . . . with more than one you’re a sitting duck.”3 This prescription makes sense in a certain way. With one child, the number of parents still outnumbers the child. There is a greater possibility of an equitable division of labor, of handing off childcare responsibilities once your partner can relieve you. When I only had my son, I planned an ambitious research agenda that involved me waking up at six every weekday morning so that I could squeeze in an hour of uninterrupted writing time before he woke. Since he was a good sleeper, with regular hours, this was relatively easy to achieve (notwithstanding my own discipline!). For about a year, I set my alarm for 6 a.m., rolled out of bed and made some tea, and then sleepily shuffled to my desk to devote approximately thirty to forty-five minutes to daily writing. I presented at three national and international conferences that year, including the most prestigious one in my discipline. I felt like a professor-mommy rock star. My days were scheduled down to the half-hour block, requiring tremendous care on my part not to “waste” any time. Even when my son got sick, which he inevitably did because of being in daycare, it did not derail my research goals. My husband and I had organized our respective schedules and childcare responsibilities down to a finely tuned science.

By the time my daughter was born, however, such a carefully calibrated life could no longer persist. Not only did she wake up every night to nurse for over a year, she was also a spotty sleeper. While she napped well during the day, I now had another child to consider during those hours, on top of teaching three classes and being involved in a very time-intensive university committee. The thought of waking early to accomplish even a little writing seemed to require monumental effort, which I couldn’t muster at the time. Even though I was well-versed in the literature that advocated for a daily writing habit (especially early-morning writing) as the key to long-term research success, I couldn’t do it. It felt like it was asking too much of myself, even for a determined, disciplined “morning person” like me. I had to shift my writing goals. I began to attend one conference a year. My drive to write and research declined. I was puzzled, even alarmed, by this reduction at first. How could adding one more child seem to occupy so much of my mental, emotional, and intellectual space? Why did one more child make such a difference, even with a partner who remained as involved as he could?

I am still not completely sure why having an additional child made such a difference. Perhaps it was physical—my kids are four years apart, so I was older when I had my daughter, and thus presumably had less energy than with the first one. It was very likely circumstantial as well: four months after my daughter was born, my husband accepted a new job that would require him to commute an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. That new morning routine alone greatly altered our family rhythms and also meant he was not as present to share in domestic responsibilities. But I suspect that the biggest shift was mental and emotional, and perhaps not even a conscious one. Having two children, for me, meant a general acceptance of, maybe even resignation toward, being enmeshed and embedded in the mundane realities of childcare: of double the scheduling and to-do lists and making sure someone is there at pickup. It meant resigning myself to the increased mental labor of caretaking—which is somehow harder to share evenly between two partners once another child is added to the mix. The consequence is that this mental load inevitably falls more on one partner than the other (usually the female one), and thus takes over a greater portion of her mental, emotional, and physical life, all of which distracts from the kind of concentrated focus and deep thinking required to do scholarly work. This happened to me after having my second child, and I acknowledge this reality without regret or resentment. What it meant, however, is that I had to redefine what it looked like for me to pursue a research agenda now that I had less mental space for it.

Given the increased mental labor that comes with having more than one child, another option is to “back down,” as Yael Chatav Schonbrun puts it.4 Schonbrun, a psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, describes the choice of remaining in her academic profession at a reduced capacity as one that “allows [her] to be engaged in multiple roles, as a researcher, therapist and home-based mom.” Yet while this choice has enabled her to stay involved in her profession, Schonbrun admits that the greater consequence has been to her sense of self:

It . . . means that my productivity within each role is limited. . . . More painful . . . is sitting in on a research meeting, listening to my colleagues bounce around new project ideas and talk about complex data analytics or new methods. . . . Where I used to feel like a member of the group, and a leader on some projects, I now feel a half step behind. . . . I will continue to be an unknown in my research community. No one is going to ask me to speak about my scientific contributions, because, in all honesty, I just haven’t contributed enough.5

Schonbrun honestly admits that the cost of choosing to reduce her research time is a sense of anonymity within her field and the recognition that she cannot participate to the same degree as her colleagues. This diminished sense of professional identity, further complicated by the knowledge of the potential to do more, is probably the hardest aspect of choosing to “back down and not bail out” in one’s career. On the one hand, Schonbrun illustrates the notion that some kind of scholarly participation, however small it may feel, is better than none at all. On the other hand, that smaller form of participation can further magnify the sense of alienation one feels from one’s discipline at large.

This paradox—the desire to hold onto my research ambitions and yet being conscious that the very act of holding on means becoming more aware of being a “step behind”—has shaped my own experience of pursuing research as both a mother and a professor at a teaching-intensive institution. It means being constantly satisfied with “enough”—enough time spent on this task, enough sources to fulfill this particular section of literature review, enough revision on the draft as a whole—while recognizing and rejecting the possibility of that alternate self, that fantasy of an idealized writing product “if only” there were more time, institutional resources, or mental space. It is a life of endless circumscription, of compelling myself to restrict, limit, and demarcate. It means resisting the inevitable pull toward expansion. Academia—whether in writing, teaching, or service—is a profession that can always demand more: more time, more energy, and more attention. While this is surely the case for many careers, it is particularly palpable in the exploratory nature of the research and writing process. More time and contemplation spent yields a depth and complexity to one’s ideas that cannot be forced in a shorter span. It is what makes the creation of knowledge interesting and meaningful. And yet I continually find myself needing to limit the pursuit of ideas and arguments simply because there is not enough mental space, even though my intellectual being ardently, even fiercely, yearns to do more.

I want to add that I am not saying that setting limits is not a natural part of the research and writing process. It is evident that any kind of research inquiry requires choosing some paths and foreclosing others. But what I am trying to convey, as Schonbrun so poignantly points out, is that feeling of being “half a step behind” and knowing that this is a choice of my own making. That this choice, like the many related to it, is complicated by numerous other considerations that go beyond my desires and individual will. Is feeling half a step behind better than not joining in at all? To put it another way, is it better not to attend the top conferences in my field, where I can feel self-conscious and frustrated at my own lack of achievement compared with those around me, or is it better to still attend and aspire? Even though I have chosen the latter, I wonder sometimes whether I would feel less divided, and perhaps (to be honest) less about myself, if I were to give up my writing goals altogether and instead devote myself more fully to my teaching and family life, as many of my colleagues have chosen, rather than trying to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Shirley Hoogstra
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Considering Motherhood and the Academy
• Part One: Navigating Academia
• Part Two: Navigating Motherhood
• Part Three: Navigating Multiple Callings
• Part Four: Navigating Support
• Epilogue: Parting Advice
• Appendix A: Institutional Support for Academic Mothers
• Appendix B: Scenarios for Further Discussion About Being “Good Mothers”
• Reflection and Discussion Questions
• List of Contributors
• Notes
• Praise for Power Women
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright